WHEN FALL IS COMING - Mark Reviews Movies

When Fall Is Coming, Music Box Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 3, 2025

Writer/director François Ozon opens When Fall Is Coming with a sermon. It's a lesson of sinning and forgiveness, revolving around the story of the meeting of Mary Magdalene, whom everyone sees as a sinner unworthy of forgiveness, and Jesus of Nazareth, who points out that this outcast woman is more worthy of it than the high priests who criticize him for his attention toward her. It's all about love, which matters more than anything else about a person's character, past, and actions.

This seems a strange introduction to Ozon's tale, which about a woman in her 70s living near a small town in the French countryside. There's no reason to suspect that Michelle (Hélène Vincent, in an incredibly nuanced performance) has done or would do anything that could be considered sinful, apart from the knowingly loaded but gently sympathetic look the priest puts Michelle's way as he gets to the moral of his homily. What we know of Michelle is that she lives a quiet and modest life in a farmhouse surrounded by the nature she holds dear, that she has one close but beloved friend whom she sees as a sister, and that, while she loves her adult daughter, she adores her grandson.

We get, in other words, the love part of the preacher's sermon. The sinning part comes across as a completely alien concept when looking at Michelle, the life she has made for herself, and the relationships she has held close to her heart. The rest of Ozon's screenplay (written in collaboration with Philippe Piazzo) puts forward a question, then: Is love really enough when it comes to one's past and present actions, or is there a limit on what we can forgive about a person, no matter how truly and honestly based in love the motives for those actions might be?

Given the serene look and relaxed feel of Ozon's film, it's difficult to believe that this story will eventually raise such thorny queries and, ultimately, arrive at such complex answers as are presented here. The screenplay raises the possibility of an attempted murder early on, and at about the halfway point, it makes it quite apparent that a murder has occurred. That's as awful an act as a person can commit against another, not to mention against those who know that person. Here's the rub of Ozon's tale, though: The consequences of that killing might result in a greater amount of love than the rest of the victim's life might have accomplished.

What's vital to the film's success as a tricky morality tale is, almost ironically, that it doesn't directly ask those questions for us. Ozon trusts that we're smart enough to see his point, to wrestle with these ideas, and to see through simple judgment to observe that there is something deeper going on here.

The filmmaker presents this simply, as the story of everyday people doing what they think is best, not for themselves, but for others. If that means murder and overlooking such a universally acknowledged crime, can the ends, filled with more love and happiness and fulfillment than previously imagined, justify such ugly means, committed with knowledge that those consequences are the likely ones?

The complications for Michelle's life arrive with the arrival of her daughter Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier) and grandson Lucas (Garlan Erlos) for a vacation at her country home. Lucas is thrilled to spend time with his grandmother, taking long walks and talking in a way he doesn't seem to with his mother. However, Valérie clearly resents Michelle and has, apparently, for most of her life.

There's a reason for that, which we eventually learn and is how Michelle and Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko) know each other so well, are as close as sisters, and left Paris for a smaller and quieter life in his place. The two women were sex workers decades ago, and the daughter has never gotten past that. She believes it has ruined her to some degree, given that she is generally unhappy, has memories of childhood teasing and bullying, and is divorced from Lucas' father. Even so, Valérie is more than happy to live in her mother's old Paris apartment and to insist that Michelle hand over this house to her now for tax purposes.

The resulting plot involves poisoned mushrooms, the question if Michelle is in the early stages of dementia or knew what she was doing when she served those as a meal, the daughter's decision to cut her mother entirely out of her and Lucas' lives, and the return from prison of Marie-Claude's son Vincent (Pierre Lottin). Vincent begins working for Michelle, overhears how Valérie is treating her mother, and decides to travel to Paris to convince the daughter that she should be nicer or just decent to the woman who gave birth to and raised her. The conversation does not go well, to say the least.

What happens after that scene is the definitive element of Ozon's storytelling. It easily could have resulted in a kind of thriller, in which the characters piece together what happened and/or try to keep it from a local police detective (played by Sophie Guillemin). Instead, the story and filmmaking remain in a lower, subdued register, simply observing how Michelle's life continues with her now-closer family and friends, how Vincent does get his life in order with Michelle's help, and how Lucas learns by way of the examples of his grandmother and Vincent, who becomes like a surrogate uncle or older cousin to him.

The whole plot of When Fall Is Coming does set up certain expectations, especially when the details of the central act are revealed or realized by certain characters. At every turn, Ozon defies them, because the story he wants to tell isn't one of transgressions and crimes and the past haunting or defining these characters. It is a story of love, in all its rich simplicity but also in putting us in the difficult position to understand it on a level that transcends what would seem to be the most obvious of sins.

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